More than 25 percent of the state's revenue in 1910 was derived from leasing African-American convicts to private enterprises.

The disfranchisement of blacks by the 1901 constitution and suffrage amendment had reduced the Republican Party as an active force in the state. For more than 60 years, until federal civil rights legislation was passed to enforce the constitutional rights of African Americans in the mid-1960s, Alabama was essentially a one-party state, with elections won in the Democratic primaries.